Technology devalues luxury? Exploring consumer responses to AI-designed luxury products

The current work examines how consumers respond to luxury products designed with significant utilization of technology. It delineates two inherent values of luxury products—emotional and functional—and argues that utilizing technology in the luxury product design process negatively impacts the emotional value but enhances the associated functional value. Such paradoxical impact of AI-led design on emotional and functional values leads to a differential effect on consumer response patterns. For luxury products that particularly draw on their superior emotional value (e.g., luxury fashion brands), using AI as a design source significantly reduces the perceived brand essence, leading to negative consumer response. However, when a luxury brand draws its essence from the associated functional value (in addition to the emotional value), either because of the product characteristics (e.g., luxury automobiles) or when such value is made externally salient (e.g., through marketing message appeals), the negative response is attenuated.